Get Over Yourself, Mary

Via Andrew Sullivan, Time magazine on the now-discredited cult of self-esteem and its results:

New research has found that self-esteem can be just as high among D students, drunk drivers and former Presidents from Arkansas as it is among Nobel laureates, nuns and New York City fire fighters. In fact, according to research performed by Brad Bushman of Iowa State University and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University, people with high self-esteem can engage in far more antisocial behavior than those with low self-worth. "I think we had a great deal of optimism that high self-esteem would cause all sorts of positive consequences and that if we raised self-esteem, people would do better in life," Baumeister told the Times. "Mostly, the data have not borne that out." Racists, street thugs and school bullies all polled high on the self-esteem charts. And you can see why. If you think you're God's gift, you're particularly offended if other people don't treat you that way. So you lash out or commit crimes or cut ethical corners to reassert your pre-eminence. After all, who are your moral inferiors to suggest that you could be doing something, er, wrong? What do they know?

Self-esteem can also be an educational boomerang. Friends of mine who teach today's college students are constantly complaining about the high self-esteem of their students. When the kids have been told from Day One that they can do no wrong, when every grade in high school is assessed so as to make the kid feel good rather than to give an accurate measure of his work, the student can develop self-worth dangerously unrelated to the objective truth. He can then get
deeply offended when he's told he is getting a C grade in college and become demoralized or extremely angry.

What I Say: Didn't we learn all this on the playground, early on? You remember the bullies who stole your lunch money, don't you, and never doubted they were kings of the hill? The same with the utterly snobbish and snotty Greek boys and girls in college. And the whole country-club set, and the shitty store clerks, and on and on . . . they all think they are just wonderful, you know? Self-esteem is not the fucking problem.

It just goes to show, once again, the eternal need for what my mama called "plain old common horse sense."

Update.  Of course, a prime example of an interstellar gap between self-esteem and actual ability is Sarah Palin.  Who, Joe Jervis reports, has just signed on with Fox News, no doubt for a handsome sum - more than any of you shitkickers will ever see in your life, I bet.

 

Yeah, it's photoshopped, not the real thing.

But sometimes a well done parody conveys a certain truth better than the real thing, you know what I mean, boys?